Boo.com spent fast and died young but its legacy shaped internet retailing

Five years ago this week Britain's dotcom dream died, killed off by a Swedish poetry critic and a former Vogue model, as fashion "e-tailer" Boo.com became the country's first high-profile internet collapse.

With it went more than £80m of cash from investors, including investment banks JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bernard Arnault, chairman of luxury group LVMH at the time, and the Benetton family. Liquidators KPMG were called in on May 17, 2000.

The stories of lavish corporate lifestyles and lack of proper management control that emerged when Boo went boom became a familiar theme as a host of so-called business-to-consumer or B2C sites and other online start-ups went to the wall in the months following the e-commerce site's demise.

Funding for internet ventures dried up as share prices plummeted and bankers tightened their belts in the wake of the tech-stock crash of spring 2000. Boo.com's high-profile founders, Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander, found themselves blamed for the excesses of a generation of tie-less wannabes.

"We were too soon and trying to do too much, but those were the times," admits Mr Malmsten, who now runs a London-based agency dealing with architects, fashion designers, graphic designers and other creative types, and prefers to stay away from the limelight.

Boo.com was founded in 1998 by Malmsten and his friend Ms Leander, a former model who wanted to create the premier online location where the cool and chic would be able to buy their clothes. They saw Boo.com not just as a site where pixillated shop assistant Ms Boo would help shoppers find the togs to match their temperament, but as a lifestyle destination.

The two had been in nursery school together in Sweden and briefly at the same high school, and decided to go into business after meeting outside a Paris nightclub in their 20s. Having sold their first internet venture, an online bookstore, in the early days of the dotcom boom they moved to London and formed Boo.com.

They reckoned the business would need £20m, 30 people and three months to launch. When it did in October 1999 it employed 400 people in eight offices, with headquarters on Carnaby Street in London, and had already swallowed four times that initial expected investment.

But everyone believed the story. Before Boo.com had sold a single item, Fortune magazine had proclaimed it one of Europe's coolest companies.

When the site went live, however, the hype was not matched by visitors or, more importantly, sales. Although it had spent several million pounds on advertising, research by pollsters Mori just before Boo.com's collapse showed that only 13.2% of internet users were aware of the name and among non-users that fell to a mere 1.4%.

In its final two months the company made £200,000 and had 300,000 web visitors, hardly sufficient to keep afloat a business selling across 18 countries. It needed $30m to keep going. But the American technology stock market Nasdaq was nosediving and shares in fellow internet high-flier Lastminute.com had failed to regain their issue price after floating at the height of the boom in March. Bankers' doors were tightly shut.

Essentially Boo.com failed because it tried to do too much: building a state-of-the-art logistics business across too many countries with an online shop front that was well beyond the capabilities of most internet user's computers. At the time Boo.com launched, 20% of UK households had access to the internet but they were using slow dial-up connections that quickly ground to a halt when anyone asked Ms Boo to show them around.

But the doomsayers who prophesied that Boo.com's collapse would spell the end of internet retailing have been proved wrong. Royal Mail reckons that 10% of all retail sales will be made online this year, while the Internet Advertising Bureau estimates that 16m people in the UK shopped online last year.

Mr Malmsten believes the internet revolution did happen, just not fast enough for Boo.com. "The internet has really taken off now. When we did it we were too early and the internet was a very new thing. Nobody had broadband. I think it is now really taking off."

Tarnished

There is, however, a case to be made that the failure of Boo.com tarnished the reputation of European web start-ups and left the web to be colonised by internet giants from across the Atlantic and the online protuberances of existing bricks and mortar retailers such as Tesco. The top 10 most visited UK sites, for instance, include just two purely online European players - CD Wow and dabs.com.

But Boo.com lives on. The site itself was bought by US-based online retailer Fashionmall.com and relaunched with a team of just nine under boss Kate Buggeln. Meanwhile the technology that underpinned the business was picked up by Dan Wagner, the outspoken former head of UK-listed technology firm Bright Station, for £250,000.

He wrapped it in with technology being developed by his in-house team and then bought out the business for a nominal sum in April 2001. Bright Station, which Mr Wagner had founded as Maid in 1984, became knowledge management company SmartLogik. SmartLogik went bust a year later.

Since then Mr Wagner has built a business, Venda.com, that gets retailers online without having to buy new systems. Instead they rent e-commerce space from Venda. He even hired one of Boo.com's senior techies, James Cronin.

"Although we decompiled and recompiled it, the technical implementation of the Boo.com platform was extremely good," he says. "And the reason it is good has nothing to do with the jokers at the helm."

After slogging through the tough post-boom days of 2003 and 2003, Venda.com now has 140 retailers and is making a profit. "I'm just beginning to put my head above the parapet again," says Mr Wagner, who was a leading figure during Britain's brief period of dotcom euphoria. "Ready to get it shot at again."

The two "jokers" from Boo.com, however, are less willing to come out of the shadows. Ms Leander now lives in Venice with her husband, raising their three children, while Mr Malmsten is maintaining a low profile at his new venture, Redgreenzebra Creative Management.

He wrote a book about his time at Boo.com, Boo Hoo: a Dot.com Story, and sold the film rights to Working Title. Despite rumours that Cameron Diaz had been lined up to play Kajsa, no film ever made it into production and the rights have since reverted to Mr Malmsten.

"I have not been keen to do anything about it," he says. "I'm really enjoying my life and my business is really taking off now, but I like working behind the scenes."